For 20 years Robert Orlando has brought his cinematic vision to the screen, beginning with his 1988 mesmerizing film “See Her Run,” representing the School of Visual Arts and New York University at the Tel Aviv Film Festival. For several years after that he worked as a freelance editor, cinematographer and director in New York City, completing his first documentary “La Famiglia” and eventually starting Nexus Media; writing, directing and editing spots for clients such as Coke, Merrill Lynch and Conde Nast. Orlando also completed numerous scripts that were contracted, optioned or purchased, including “The Road,” later featured in William J. Phillips’ “Writing Short Scripts”. In 2001, Orlando wrote and directed his debut feature “Moment In Time,” winning several awards and earning him a chance to work as a writer and director on the black comedy Choose Life with Peter Dobson and several other notables. He has also adapted the works of writers like Mark Helprin, Jonathan Lethem and Charles Ardai.
Why not? Paul is filled with contradiction. He has great defects and also possesses great idealism. Some of the Western World’s greatest thinkers outside the circles of Faith have characterized him as mad spiritual genius. In defiance of his contemporaries, Paul single-handedly told the world how to believe in Jesus. But what’s so particularly fascinating is that he knew how to change the world but failed to change himself. Was he a good man or a bad man? Were the gifts he used to rise up to be Pharisee and leader of the Temple the same tools that caused his downfall? I say yes. He was an outsider, a diaspora Jew who rose to the heights of Jewish learning and politics. This same ambition that required him to be the best—a man of unique status—was the same fuel that lit the fire for his own self-destruction. Though Paul was a Jew through and through, his story reads like a Greek tragedy, with much pain, irony, turn of fate, and of course his wonderful idealism painted into the image of God’s coming kingdom. An idealism we can argue was centered on his visions and perceptions, which, at some point, when held in the face of contrary evidence, was also corrupted.
